The one guitarist Eric Clapton called out of everyone’s league: “Never seemed to dry up”
There isn’t a single scrap of blues music that Eric Clapton hasn’t studied to a certain degree.
Even though he was one of the greatest rock and roll guitarists that the world had ever seen, the blues was always Clapton’s first love, and some of the best songs that he ever played always came back to the kind of format of three chords and solos that said more than any words ever could. But even if he did a lot of talking with his guitar, Clapton could understand when some artists had more facility on the instrument than him.
Then again, ‘Slowhand’ was the first to say that everyone calling him ‘God’ in the late 1960s wasn’t exactly wrong. He was trying to make some of the greatest blues ever made, and while he did end up looking like a blues prophet in every sense of the word, it was all done in service of joining the ranks of his favourite guitar players like BB King and Robert Johnson in the history books.
His job was to carry on what those geniuses had been doing to the next generation, but that didn’t mean that he was alone in that assessment. Cream seemed to birth a thousand different blues bands that were trying to do the same thing that he was, and while everyone from Jimmy Page to Jeff Beck had more than a few pieces of blues in their DNA, Clapton was always connected more to the pure sounds of what Muddy Waters or Buddy Guy were doing with their guitars.
But Clapton wasn’t alone in bringing that kind of music to the masses, either. He knew that he was the next in a long line of guitarists that made the guitar sing, but he could be knocked out by anyone that seemed to have their own voice on the instrument. Mark Knopfler was able to play things he couldn’t think of playing, and John Mayer even surprised him when he first heard him perform, but there was no one that seemed to embody the spirit of blues guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughan could.
From the first time that people heard Texas Flood, Vaughan seemed to be the kind of artist that Clapton had always dreamed of becoming. He was deeply entrenched in the blues from the minute that he picked up his guitar, and while he wasn’t even trying to adapt with the times whenever he made his songs, that didn’t really matter when he played as seamlessly as he did on ‘Pride and Joy’ and ‘Love Struck Baby’.
This was a legend that was just starting to show the world what he could do, and even if Clapton had almost a decade of work already done, he felt that no one could attack the guitar like Vaughan could, saying, “I remember being fascinated by the fact that he never ever seemed to be lost in any way. It wasn’t ever that he took a breather or paused to think where he was going to go next. It just flowed out of him. Always seemed to flow out of him. That doesn’t come just with virtuosity, practice or any of those. It’s not a question of doing it over and over again or anything like that. He never ever seemed to kind of dry up.”
And even by blues rock standards, that’s the kind of feat that no one can really teach. Even when sculpting some of his greatest solos, Vaughan knew where the tune was going before the rest of his band did half the time, and some of the biggest highlights of his career come from him trying his best to leave everyone stunned from the minute that they hear one of his solos coming in.
So while Clapton was already one of the biggest guitarists in the world, he could admit when his god status was dethroned just a little bit. Vaughan might not have been long for this world, but every guitarist was willing to give him his flowers while they had the time whenever he performed for them.
